Merry Chimpmas!

This year's Xmas cards then.  Like last year, based on a silly gag.  The inside of the card was just going to have ooks and eeks but I tempered myself and added some English words.  He wasn't necessarily going to have fur but Daniel Bystedt's great furry character tutorial was on YouTube so I followed that for pointers.  Also I tried messing with the hue of the finished chimp to see if purple made more sense.  It did not!  No turntable for this, the back's complete but you're not really gaining anything.

Having said that about the turntable, here's an alternative.  I went through my incrementally saved projects and rendered out what they looked like at the time.  So you have, going clockwise:

1. Initial block out, I really do start with circles cylinders and rings.
2. Hands and feet.
3. Merge and remesh from many pieces into head and body pieces.
4. Remesh the head (a technical step that doesn't lend itself to a screenshot)
5. Head adjustment and body paint.
6. Head paint.
7. Body pose, banana creation, hat shape, insert curve brush fairy lights.
8. Hat refinement, bulb materials.
9. Hat bobbles, bulb inflation.
10. Head refinement and pose, new eyes, bulb inflation, material and light work.
11. Fibres!

I like:

• The fur!  Three separate sets of fibres: Close and dense fur, specific longer fur (thighs, ears etc), and sparse long fur for variation.  Very pleased with it.
• Those blocky squared off hands and feet.  Just what I was aiming for.
• The background, I remembered to add a shape for interest.
• The folds in the hat; largely started with very low level cylinder geometry pushed around to keep quads of the same row the same relative size, just like real cloth would  if it was quadded.

I dislike:

• Getting a really nice noise for the wrapped banana but then when it applied (or rendered) it broke my geometry, so I had to switch it off.  It looked just like slightly crumpled wrapping paper!
• The bulb placement (despite being an elegant solution) was a bit inelegant on the final composite.

Happy Christmas!

Stylised Lord Summerisle 3D Print.

And now something different!  Inspired by a line of vinyl toys called "Vinyl Idolz" I thought I would give aping their style a go but for a character that I would like to have done in that style.  So of course I picked Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle, from The Wicker Man.  In his pose from the end of the movie that any google search would yield ya.  Here he is:

Neat huh?  Sumer Is Icumen In!  Created using my standard ZBrush to Sculpteo workflow.  It's a shame his build has been fraught with issues.  I had hoped to have him completed by the May Day bank holiday coincide with the film's timeline but ah well.  The jacket piece, in a resin that was a new material for me, I managed to snap trying to wedge the jumper chest in place.  Then the reprinted jacket came and was a surprisingly terrible quality so I had to get that part printed three times in all.  Also the chest piece needed to be re-done to actually fit in the middle.  This is the first print I've done that has had this level of issues, and I think it was down to me getting cocky.  Don't get cocky!  Lessons learned though.  He's a hiccup over 6" tall from soles of his shoes to the tips of his fingers.  A nice size.

I like:

• That he is precisely how I would expect a Vinyl Idolz Lord Summerisle to look!
• That hair.  Lots of curve tubes with a ton of refinement.
• He stands on his own.  A bit difficult to gauge when he's still at the virtual stage.
• The curve going from his ankles to his head.  It's a nice action line.

I dislike:

• Something's up with his feet pegs, they should be more flush with his trousers.  I think it's something to do with having the plastic dyed when it's not had all the dust removed from the internals.
• That it took three goes to get the chest / jumper working.
• My miniature painting skills are very rusty, but I've mostly got away with it.

So this might be the last graphics post for a bit.  My next project is most likely going to be an iPhone game so not really part of the creative geometry remit.  I may post stuff about that here too though, it should lend itself to screenshots although it'll be 2D and sprite based.

Ulala Blue!

Okay, so not as rapid an update as I was hoping.  Mainly due to 3D print woes on another project which meant I've been working on two in tandem, and generally not having time for either.  Anyways, more Ulala work!  A sister piece to last year's Amazing Tales magazine cover, using most of the same layout stuff from that, and my Ulala model, although with a new outfit:  Whenever I unlock a new costume in Space Channel 5 Part 2 I assess it for using for these projects, and this is one of those!  A very Courreges feel to the outfit and the layout is shamefully an homage to a Cosmonauts poster I saw in the Science Museum.

It went through a lot of revisions on the actual scene.  The intent was to have her walking on a small planetoid a la Super Mario Galaxy, with alien flora, as if her and the Morolians were out on a school day trip.  But I couldn't get a look I liked, hence this being in purgatory for a time.

I like:

• Most everything on this one.  Very pleased with how it all came together once I worked out the scene.
• That a friend thought it was a targeted ad when I showed her a sneak preview!
• The outfit - with a specular overlay in Photoshop it really looks like a futuristic shiny mini-dress.
• How easy it was to reuse whole groups of layers in Photoshop when on the layout stage, probably just how a professional would!

I dislike:

• Ulala's blown out face.  One brightness contrast layer too far.  D'oh.
• Everyone's a bit disconnected from the rainbow ring, as it glows, it's got no shadows cast on it.  A necessary evil, but it does make it a bit airy.
• How many iterations it took me with some masks and overlays in Photoshop.  I need to tweak my workflow on some of it to help with layer masks updating with the right layers.

Whether another cover of Amazing Tales gets made, I'm unsure, as I really want to move on to making an iPhone game which will take a lot of my creative run-time, and as such I've been trying to finish this project and the 3D print one.  I will always gravitate to Ulala though, my space reporter muse.

Gundam - Shaldoll Scout Turntable.

Associated turntable for the Gundam - Shaldoll Scout.

Gundam Turntable from Tom Lewis on Vimeo.

Gundam - Shaldoll Scout.

Crikey!  What do we have here?  A finished project!  I have had a bit of a block on finishing stuff:  I've another two projects that are 3/4 done, hence the lack of updates.  Here's a bit of a departure from ladies and monsters though:  A robot!  Not done one before and yes it's thematically similar to the Tortilus but this felt much different to build.

I say "robot", it's a Gundam, technically, and a RGE-C350S Shaldoll Scout to be precise.  I have a big book of Gundam line art of *all* Gundam ever, so thumbed through and found this model to use as reference.

So it felt like a departure from the Tortilus as this was 99% zModeler and dynamic subdivisions, which as an old box modeler makes me happy.  I can think in low poly cages.  No visible UV work either (the shoulder has a decal on it but I couldn't have a front view and that in the same shot) meaning all the noise is procedural noisemaker 3D placement rather than UV placement which made it way quicker.  Three layers: erosion, dents, and paint colour variance.  All composited together in Photoshop in post.  I'll definitely use that tactic again.

I like:

• Big robot!  Definitely fulfilling my own brief there!
• All the lines aren't super sharp, there's a little bevel on most everything.
• My noise work.  It seems too much up close but when it's printed A4 size it should be just right.
• That I didn't spend another x hours doing more kibble that wouldn't be visible or in keeping with the cleaner Gundam style.
• I have had all the practise with the zModeler brush I'll need for a time!  With that it's so easy to add secondary detail on low polygon cages then cheat the high polygon look.
• The Photoshop composite has made it look like there's WAY more fidelity than there actually is.  It oughta, there's 50 layers actually doing something!

I dislike:

• No visible decals.  Would it have killed me to add some warning signs in a PS layer?  It would've helped sell the size even if they became barely visible.
• That I didn't bevel the shoulder gun where the barrel meets the housing.  Look at it!  Amateur hour!  I mean, I'm not being paid so it's not professional hour but still...
• That you can't really tell that he's 18.2m tall but I did keep the camera low to aid that.
• Gundam v Transformer gripes:  If I'd done that latter I'd've had more visible interest with an endoskeleton, it wouldn't all be one material, and it would have been way more poseable!

Right, time to man up and finish one of those almost done projects!

Happy Christmas!

So here's the image that went out on my Christmas cards this year.  Enjoy!

I wanted to do the whole "A t-rex has short arms so can't do a thing" joke with dressing a tree.  Job done right?  I intended to do this as a purely 2D piece but was frankly laughably bad at sketching on my Wacom in Photoshop.  I probably need a Cintiq eh Santa?

I like:

• How I drew out seven different heads using pen and paper to explore the shape.  The tall snout came from this and that was me just trying something that pushed the norm.
• The tree, as it took many attempts to get the fidelity appropriate for the dinosaur.  It's got a touch of the monkey puzzle to it which suits with the prehistoric look.
• That I got to create a toon shader material in ZBrush for the end effect to help it be more illustrative.

I dislike:

• That he can still blatantly reach up and down enough to dress another couple of rungs of tree, but I was so pleased with the composition as it is.  Creative license.
• His texture's a bit wonky with the triangles, and after lighting and toon shading you can't tell his belly is yellower than the rest of him.  I'll push that more next time.

Oh and the inside of the card asks how he put his hat on.  A worthy question I'm sure you'll agree!

Introducing Ulala! (v1 3D print)

Greetings space cats!  This project is the intellectual culmination of a lot of the classes I've taken over the last two years.  The appealing character design from Mike Defeo's class combined with the 3D print knowledge from Joseph Drust's one.  Did you know you can't get a good Space Reporter Ulala figure?  Well, you still can't, but I have one!

So the combination process: I had Ulala finished from an earlier 2D piece, then I chopped her up for joints (after dressing her in trousers as her traditional short skirt would be too stiff to be useful when posing).  Shipped to Sculpteo to print (more on them later) and then painted with Games Workshop paints.  A bunch more involved than this paragraph would indicate!

Sculpteo then.  She's printed in their white plastic but only on their standard layer thickness (100-150µm).  I wanted the fine thickness (60µm) but apparently she's too fragile for that.  Now I chose to combine her pieces on a sprue to keep the cost down (Sculpteo wanted to charge me four times as much to print each piece on separate runs, so I made a sprue to force her to be printed in one go) but doing this didn't help isolate which pieces of her are too thin (probably the microphone).  I do intend to re-print her after working out the fragile bits and re-orientating parts to mitigate the tree-ring effect of 3D printing, but not for a little while.  I had thought to sand her down to remove layer lines but trying that had a tendency to give the material an almost furry quality, as though I was pulling apart a block of nylon, so I didn't do too much of that, so her fidelity is not as high as I would like.  This wasn't mitigated at all by three acrylic undercoats and two coats of colour paint and three layers of matte varnish.  Lots learnt though.  Oh boy lots learnt!

On to more pics...  She's about 16cm tall BTW, there's no real scale indicators in the pic.

I like:

• She's the best action figure of Ulala you can (can't) get, which is almost damning with faint praise, definitely not my intent!  I think she's just great.
• The outfit is a faithful recreation of the spy suit from Space Channel 5 part 2.
• A large proportion of pieces are reusable for a different outfit.
• That she stands on her own and can facepalm (two of my aims when making a figure).

I dislike:

• The thick layers.  Should there be a next time I'll work out why Sculpteo reported that the model was too fragile for thin layers.
• The muddy face paint job, it's a side effect of the thick layers I'm sure.
• The midriff joint.  It's big and invasive for what it does (adding the potential for some contrapposto swing in them hips).  Ball pop next time maybe as opposed to a Revoltech joint to give the capability for more sublte movements.
• The thigh joints.  I knew it would be touch and go how high the knee can lift upwards before the hips got in the way but it was a trade off between that and cutting chunks out.  I should've cut more.
• Paint chipping despite all the coats of paint and varnish to finish.
• She's too fragile to really get in there and pose like I might with a store bought figure.

More dislikes than likes but they don't have the same weighting.  She'll be posed, not too outlandishly, and probably stay that way, so the paint chipping and joint dislikes aren't such an issue, and from a distance she reads just fine, largely mitigating the layers and the face.  At some point I'll do a version two with the finer layer thickness.

Having said all that I think she's fab-u-lous.  Aah to have enough hours in the day to make the entire cast of Space Channel 5.  That is most definitely not a teaser for a future 3D print project.  I do not have that many hours in the day hah!

Memo to self:  Recreate the Max Fleischer - Betty Boop pose with her.